Teaching Akhmatova
by Greg Weiss
Her poems exist in the context of eternity, I can’t really explain it. —Angela Ball
I was watching Anatoly Naiman and Helga Landauer’s A Film about Anna Akhmatova (2008), and was really struck that despite the Russian government murdering her husband, imprisoning her son for seventeen years, and monitoring, censoring, and starving her, Anna Akhmatova was a proud enough Russian that outliving Stalin was a great thing to her. I don’t fault less proud Russians in the least, but I’ve been trying to apply her personal sense of patriotism to the ongoing Mississippification of Wisconsin.* To state the blindingly obvious, contemporary Wisconsin isn’t yet in the same ballpark as Stalinist Russia, and in fact seems like it’s headed more towards Tsarist. Maybe they’ll put that on the Welcome to Wisconsin signs.
I’ve been trying to view Wisconsin’s desecration in the context of eternity, but that seems too much like a poem Robert Frost would write about my leaving my farm after the storm and plowing my fertile furrow elsewhere. But of course Frost’s advice, at least sometimes during the Depression, was the same as mine to the Wisconsin teachers: Strike—if they don’t think they need your potatoes, let them have a go without them. The cops and firefighters should strike too, let them fight their own fires.
I teach World Lit at the University of Southern Mississippi each Monday night from 6:30-9:15. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I’m subbing for Dr. Nicolle Jordan’s World Lit section. Dr. Jordan taught me two courses on eighteenth-century English literature, which I don’t have much natural affinity for or interest in, and is one of my favorite teachers, a mensch, so this afternoon I read pages 1-68 of R.K. Narayan’s 1958 novel The Guide, tomorrow’s assigned reading for her class.
Although I often don’t read Introductions, I thought it might be worthwhile to read Michael Gorra’s to The Guide because (1) it was short and (2) it was likely I might not read the whole book, so maybe this would help fill me in. As I found some of Gorra’s arguments interesting, I figured I’d start my World Lit class that night by reading them aloud to my kids and seeing what happened.
I began with a part in which Gorra relates an anecdote, passed along to him by the novelist Anita Desai, about a writing workshop in which a white man who had been raised in India and an Indian woman who was studying in the United States both submitted stories set in an Indian kitchen. The white man described the physical details of the kitchen quite precisely, while the Indian woman didn’t describe them at all. When Desai mentioned this, the Indian woman said that everyone—at least in India—knows what a kitchen looks like, there’s no need to describe it. Kristin Miller, a quiet girl who comes to class in scrubs, said that she thought the Indian woman was respecting the reader’s intelligence.
Gorra then argued that, like the Indian woman in Desai’s workshop, Narayan didn’t, metaphorically speaking, describe kitchens, that there was a distinct lack of details in his writing. However, critics such as V.S. Naipaul respond that the refusal to detail amounts to an elision of reality, and most often of hardship. So, I asked my kids, how did those two concerns relate to each other: on the one hand, Narayan is respecting the reader’s intelligence by not telling him things he already knows, but is he at the same time limiting his intelligence by omitting facts?
I was met with silence. So, what about “The Schooner Flight,” which we’d read two weeks before? Did they feel like Derek Walcott objectively presented the facts, or that he editorialized? Overall, the latter. But in relation to Requiem, which we’d read the week before, the class was evenly split. Gracie, who I taught English 102 to, offered that Requiem featured a lot of detail, and cited the opening section, in which another woman in line asks Akhmatova if she can describe the situation, and Akhmatova says that she can.
“All right,” I said, “but you can’t really name any details of anything that happens in the poem—you don’t know what the prison looks like, you don’t even know if it has bars, you have no idea what any of the other women waiting in line look like—”
Morgan, who never talks in class, cut me off: “But that’s not the point. I don’t want to be bothered with stupid, pointless details.” She felt strongly about it. I asked them if they ever wanted detail.
“Newspaper articles use detail,” said Alexandria, “because they’re trying to persuade you of something, you use detail to persuade people that something actually happened. Akhmatova isn’t detailed about setting or what people look like, but she’s very detailed about how people feel.”
“I agree with that,” said Morgan.
In 1949, after her son Lev had already been in prison for ten years, he was sentenced to another seven. Akhmatova, in an attempt to free him, wrote overtly Communist poetry. In “In Praise of Peace,” for instance, she calls Stalin “The true master of life,/The sovereign of mountains and rivers.” That level of deliberate self-degradation, although in the service of love, is literally obscene. It also did not hasten Lev’s release.
On Letterman last night Dave was interviewing Charles Barkley about the upcoming NCAA basketball championship, for which Barkley will be a commentator. After a couple little jokes, he asked Barkley if it was difficult to comment on college basketball, since he usually covered professional basketball.
“No,” said Barkley, “the only hard thing is learning all those names. But basketball is basketball. A lot of people think they know about basketball because they know a lot of players’ names.”
I’ve always admired Barkley, and loved how he distinguished between knowing players’ names and understanding basketball as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. This is Russia for Akhmatova: she understands it beyond its players. And yet she gave in—maternal grief overwhelmed understanding. But not permanently, and she never included those poems in her catalogue.
My UW-Madison friend Liz’s mother has been a special ed teacher for twenty years, and Liz—at least now—would like to teach elementary school for her entire life. As a result, we both feel extremely strongly and personally about the idea that teachers are worthless. She and I are in an NCAA tournament pool together, and she has named her bracket—you have to name it—“The Workers Are Going Home,” in honor of the lyric from Weezer’s “My Name Is Jonas.” When I see it I begin to cry, and I don’t even really like Weezer. I post on Liz’s Facebook wall that I agree with her, that these Republicans want to turn Wisconsin into Mississippi, and that I would know what a disaster that is better than almost anyone. When I tell my wife Nicole about the interaction, minus the Weezer and crying, she tells me that I have it a little wrong: the Republicans may have convinced some voters that teachers are worthless, but it’s because teachers are so powerful that Republicans are trying to outlaw them; it’s like Frederick Douglass said—once slaves started learning to read it was only a matter of time.
My class’s favorite part of A Film about Anna Akhmatova was when Naiman, before entering Akhmatova’s dacha, tells the camera that the tour guide is a liar. He then walks to the door, and she lets him in and shows him around. She tells him things he believes to be false—like what purposes different rooms served—and he makes faces at the camera behind her back. She, for her part, says that the tour consists of facts about Akhmatova and the house, as well as recitations of her and Akhmatova’s poetry.
“Do you think,” said Alexandria, “that she tells the people on the tour which poems are hers and which are Akhmatova’s?”
I have many favorite parts of A Film about Anna Akhmatova, but one of them is when Naiman says that it has been reported that he was Akhmatova’s secretary, but that was false. What would happen, he said, is that she would dictate a poem and he would type it. The first time he asked her if she wanted to do another one, but she said that she had a rule: Only do one thing a day. Anyway, said Naiman, I performed secretarial tasks for Akhmatova for four or five hours a day, but I was not her secretary.
On January 30, 1911 in Kiev, Akhmatova wrote the following poem:
The heart’s memory of the sun grows faint.
The grass is yellower.
A few early snowflakes blow in the wind,
Barely, barely.The narrow canals have stopped flowing—
The water is chilling.
Nothing will ever happen here—
Oh, never!The willow spreads its transparent fan
Against the empty sky.
Perhaps I should not have become
Your wife.The heart’s memory of the sun grows faint.
What’s this? Darkness?
It could be!… One night brings winter’s first
Hard freeze.
We read this the week after we discussed Gorra’s Introduction to The Guide. I tell them that there are adjectives in the poem, but basically no details. Why is that?
“Because,” says Morgan, “she wants you to focus on the action.”
“But,” I say, “there isn’t really any action—the whole poem can be summarized as, ‘The sun’s going down, winter’s coming, perhaps I should not have become your wife.’”
“Maybe,” says Andrew, “the poem is about feeling like there’s nothing going on, and so there’s nothing going on in regards to details or plot.”
Morgan says, “What about ‘Perhaps I should not have become/Your wife?’” She seems to really like Akhmatova.
“So that’s the whole poem?” says Andrew.
“Doesn’t it say it all?”
The class starts to murmur a little bit, so I say, “What do the rest of you think?”
More murmuring, but nobody says anything. I write on the board:
Perhaps I should not have become
Your wife.
I give them a second to read it, then have them vote on whether or not they think it’s a good poem. (We do a lot of voting.) All of them think it’s good, and Andrew says, “I don’t know if it says it all, but it says a lot. Do you think it’d be better if that stanza was the whole poem?”
I write on the board:
The willow spreads its transparent fan
Against the empty sky.
Perhaps I should not have become
Your wife.
We vote on whether we like this as a poem, which we all do, and then whether we like it better than the two-line version, but we can’t decide. So I give them an hour to rearrange the poem, as a class, however they want to, adding and deleting whatever they like, then go up to the fourth floor and walk from my desk to the water-fountain over and over, and the same with the bathroom. I try to read, but I’ve been reading all day; I call Nicole, but she’s at the bar with a friend. After an hour, I walk back into the class and say, “Will one of you read me all of yours’ revision of the poem?”
They all stand up with their books in their hands. The realization that they’re going to recite their poem together crosses my face, and they laugh at my surprise. I sit down, and Trell—who was a regional R & B star for a couple years before enrolling at USM—looks around the room. Everybody’s quiet. He says, “1, 2, 3, go,” and they begin to slowly read:
The heart’s memory of the sun grows faint.
The grass is yellower.
A few early snowflakes blow in the wind,
Barely, barely.The narrow canals have stopped flowing—
The water is chilling.
Nothing will ever happen here—
Oh, never!The willow spreads its transparent fan
Against the empty sky.
Perhaps I should not have become
Your wife.The heart’s memory of the sun grows faint.
What’s this? Darkness?
It could be!... One night brings winter’s first
Hard freeze.
They watch me closely for a reaction and smirk and grin, but in an inclusive way, as though they think that I’ll enjoy this, which I do—I have to bite my lip to keep from crying tears of joy at the sight of thirty World Lit students choosing to recite their rewritten poem aloud like first-graders. So many people are so scared of poetry, as though it’s an unpredictable dog, and they declaim Akhamatova’s sad song exultantly. When they finish, I say, “So why did you decide to do it Akhmatova’s way?”
“Well,” says Trell, “we started talking about how a woman saying ‘Perhaps I should not have become/Your wife’ is like the beginning of winter, in that it doesn’t seem like things are likely to, at least for the most part, get warmer for awhile. It’s a depressing thing to say. And then, at least here in Mississippi, but I think most places, sudden darkness is freezing and scary, which is also how ‘Perhaps I should not have become/Your wife’ is—it sounds like she’s going to kill him. So it all comes together.”
